What Is

This Blog “Ideas for Leaders” about?

The Target

As identified by its title the target audience of the Blog is leaders. But what is a leader? Must anyone that has or takes responsibility for leading a grouping of people be a leader? Is every manager a leader? Does every leader have to be a manager? Can leadership be an acquired skill?

From a broad perspective, every entrepreneur, small business owner, manager of any department and executives in any type of organization must have leadership skills to succeed. Through this Blog we hope to help anyone in such positions acquire and/or enhance their leadership competencies and help them improve their organizations.

The Focus

But to succeed a Blog requires a focus. When one contemplates organization development as a topic area, focus seems impossible. Through the 1980 and 1990’s –in retrospect the era of the real birth of this fields emerged: literally thousands of books and papers were written; business schools and university curricula developed; and gurus’ of these disciplines emerged. Add to this the impact of the Internet, the emergence of blogs and the added contributions of many others to the overall knowledge base – focus seems an impossibility.

As outlined in the article “How Do you Improve/Optimize an Organization” under the heading Understanding the Framework I set forth a methodology for creating a framework that brings context to the overall field of organization development. The methodology has deep research roots, but equally important it has 17 years of application exposure. Even though, I will not claim it to be totally comprehensive. I do however challenge everyone to critique it and offer alternatives and/or modifications. If this only serves to enhance the concept of an all encompassing framework for the field of organization and management development, this would make this undertaking worthwhile.

Optimization

For anyone involved in the Internet, web site optimization, search engine optimization (SEO), content management optimization (CMO) amongst others have become popular and commonly used terms. Optimization is a term that has been applied in many fields and disciplines as a way to express a process of trying to reach some higher order objective.

Taking an active commerce web site as an example, optimizing it would mean providing the absolutely best experience for every individual that ever uses it – so that they would achieve their exact purpose(s) every time that they visit the site. Recognizing the potential of hundreds of thousands of unique visitors that visit these sites every day, and the different purposes that each may have, the permutations and combinations are virtually infinite. The task of optimizing a web site may be impossible in that ideal, but if the web site addresses only the audience that they are targeting and focuses on the most popular purposes of visit, through an optimization process the organization can attain very satisfactory results.

Similarly in attempting to optimize an organization, there is no ideal solution, rather an effort to continuously understand where the organization needs to focus its improvement initiatives so that it continues to grow and succeed over the long term.

 Print This Page